


every poem an epitaph

by arbitrarily



Category: Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-23
Updated: 2011-08-23
Packaged: 2017-10-22 23:38:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/243839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>when they meet again, in a restaurant, a bottle of champagne and a young war hero for company, they will not be strangers; their kind has never been strangers to each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	every poem an epitaph

>   
> Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.  
> (Jeremy Bentham)
> 
>  
> 
> I couldn’t get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.  
> (Little Beast, Richard Siken)

 

  
A long, long time ago, an alchemist named Paracelsus said: “All substances are poisons, there is none which is not a poison. It is the dose that distinguishes a poison from a remedy.”

Four hundred odd years later Major Dieter Hellstrom walked into a cinema owned by Shosanna Dreyfus.

A Pabst film was playing.

 

 

 

“I want my money back,” he said two hours later.

Shosanna had eyed the red band on his arm and she managed a tight smile anyway.

“It does not work that way.”

 

 

 

With every person met, you run the risk of obsession. There is that unasked, unformed question, an idea that does not even take shape until it is far too late and you know, you already know, the answer is yes.

Will he be the one to consume me? 

(If the answer is no, then know this: you will not even bother with this question).

(You may skip ahead to the end where you are tired and alone).

(The point is: you have been warned).

(The point is: you won’t be getting your money back).

 

 

 

She comes to him. The stairs to his apartment are steep.

She knocks on the door; he opens it clad in an undershirt and loose trousers. She visibly blanches and then clears her throat.

Their eyes meet and the corners of his mouth begin to pull up. He leans against the doorjamb, cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

“In the neighborhood?” he drawls tightly. “You are aware such things as curfews still exist – even for you, Shosanna Dreyfus.” Her eye contact with him does not waver, but she blinks; he doesn’t. “I could have you arrested,” he says. He pulls the cigarette from his mouth. “I  _should_ have you arrested.”

“Can I come in?” is her response.

“By all means,” he says and takes a small step aside. In order for her to pass through the doorway half of her body must come into contact with his.

 

 

 

They met in the early spring.

They both died that June.

(When she died, she did not know he was already dead. When he died, he had no way of knowing she was a day away from death herself).

(So it goes).

 

 

 

“What can I do for you?” he asks from behind her. Shosanna stands still, and he circles her. She can feel her resolve crumbling and she takes a deep breath.

“I think you know.” She says it quietly. The line had such potential for come-hither coquette, but Shosanna does not say it like that. She would never intend it like that. Instead, she says it like the small, sad admission it is. If she had planned this beyond the natural actions of pulling first a pair of trousers on and then a pair of shoes, shutting the door quietly behind her and then walking, careful, like a thief in the night, she imagines she could say: I did not see this going like this.

Hellstrom’s smile is full-blown.

 

 

 

Shosanna stuck to a pattern, a routine of behavior, that made finding her outside the cinema easy.

One evening Hellstrom sat down across from her. She had finished her meal but she sat there with a glass of wine raised to her lips.

“Eating alone?” he asked. He threw an arm over the back of the empty chair next to him and reclined. A waitress hovered nervously near their table, and Hellstrom pointed at Shosanna’s glass of wine and held up one finger. “There’s a shame.” Shosanna was silent and took another sip of her wine for lack of anything else to do.

“Your French is quite good,” she finally said, something almost begrudging in the way she said it.

Hellstrom did not really smile. “How’s your German?” he asked in his native language. The waitress set down his glass of wine; he drained half of it in one large gulp.

Shosanna raised a hand and gestured as though to demonstrate “middling,” and then she shook her head.

“Not good,” she said in rough German.

“You should learn,” he said, and the implication of that made her mouth go dry. She put her glass of wine down and fought hard against his stare.

 

 

 

“How’s your French?” Landa asked Hellstrom. Landa counted cigarettes with his fingertips but did not yet choose one to light.

Hellstrom had shrugged. “Decent,” he answered in the inquired language. Landa chuckled, finally selected a cigarette and lit it.

“Please, let’s not be humble then,” the colonel said.

Hellstorm shrugged once more but the grin on his face betrayed him. “I have a natural ear,” he said in French.

“I should say so.”

“Shosanna Dreyfus?” Landa said after a beat; he drummed his fingers on the table and Hellstrom fought the urge to slouch in his seat. When Colonel Landa had mentioned he had a discrete project in mind for the major, this had not been what he had in mind. “She owns a cinema. Or I should say,” and at this, Landa smiled as though privy to a private punchline, “Emmanuelle Mimieux owns a cinema.”

“Emmanuelle Mimieux,” Hellstrom echoed. He tried the name out, felt the way it stretched in his mouth, kept company by the smoke and the nicotine of his own cigarette.

“Oui. Mademoiselle Mimieux and her cinema. I advise you become a patron. I do believe there is a Riefenstahl showing there, if that’s the direction your interests lay.” Hellstrom had ignored him, ground out his cigarette in a crystal ashtray.

“Shosanna Dreyfus,” Hellstrom finally said. “Shosanna Dreyfus.”

 

 

 

He fits two fingers between her legs and he barely touches her. They brush the front of her underwear and then push past it, the pads of his fingertips seeking out the wetness there. He lets out a sharp breath through his nose, and Shosanna can feel it. He swallows hard; she can feel that too.

“Take those off,” he tells her. She does.

 

 

 

Dieter Hellstrom was never a man with a mission. This alone marked him as odd among his fellow officers. Truth be told, he did not care much about the Jews one way or the other, alive or dead; what he knew was that people, people in general, they disgusted him, they bored him. The Jews were a class of people, and if the Fuhrer wanted him to hate them, wanted him to arrest them, kill them, he could do that. He would kill a fellow officer with the same lack of thought or emotion, because this simple fact remained: Major Dieter Hellstrom of the Gestapo had no patience and he had no sympathy, no love for what the poets and the sensitive call humanity.

Couple that fact with this fact: Dieter Hellstrom enjoyed little more than receiving an assignment and carrying it out in the most unlikely manner. 

He would always take the path that would reap the most collateral.

“I want you to tend to the girl,” Colonel Landa had told him.

There were many ways this could have gone.

(This is false. There is only one way this could have gone. When you know who your actors are, when you know the triad of names Shosanna Dreyfus, Dieter Hellstrom, Emmanuelle Mimieux, the realm of the possible narrows itself down to that dot in the center of the screen).

(Nothing else).

 

 

 

“Touch yourself,” he says, and this is a game, everything is a game for him.

She fucks herself on her own hand; her fingers are not enough.

Her head tips back and her thumb stutters over her clit. A shaky breath escapes her, fills the quiet room.

Hellstrom sinks to his knees before her and brushes her hand out of the way. His grip on her thighs hurts and his eyes meet hers as he leans forward, pink wet tongue finding pink wet flesh.

She is not fast enough to catch the sound that leaves her mouth and her hips rise against him. He stops that. A firm arm held over the expanse of her hips and she is trapped. 

 

 

 

They met for dinner more days than not. She would be seated at the same table, and he would walk in, sit across from her. They would drink wine. Some nights they would ignore the presence of the other and read their respective books and not speak.

That evening, he did not sit. He stood over her and Shosanna glanced up from her book.

“Private Zoller speaks highly of your cinema,” he said, smirked.

Shosanna looked up at him with empty eyes. “I don’t know who that is,” she said flatly. She turned to the next page in her book while still looking at Hellstrom. A grin first started on his face, and then he opened in a thick laugh.

“You do beat all, Mademoiselle.”

Shosanna had scowled. Hellstrom said “Mademoiselle” the same way the rest of the world said “whore” or “bitch,” or in France now, “Jew.”

Something darker had invaded his smile and Shosanna flipped another page while she watched his eyes flicker from her fingers to her mouth back up to her eyes. He took a step forward, his leather coat creaking with the movement, and Shosanna had to crane her neck to meet his gaze. Eye contact struck her as important. Vital, even, her defense against his mounting offense. He rested a hand in the center of her book and pressed it down flat against the table, the used spine yielding easily.

“That’s cheating,” he said. “You’re not supposed to look ahead.”

Her hands were still on either side of the book, holding it open same as his hand in the center held it open too. Their fingers did not touch. Shosanna averted her eyes for a moment, turned to the book, her hands, his, and she swallowed. His fingers were long and slender and almost reached the fingers of her right hand.

“I’ve read it before,” she said as she turned back to him. His face was serious, left hand flat in the center of her book, his right hovering near her bent elbow. Shosanna realized in that moment she wanted him to touch her; the thought left her vaguely ill. She did not move away from him.

“That’s stupid,” he told her. “That’s a waste of your time.”

“My time to waste,” she answered flippantly.

Hellstrom swallowed and he pulled the book closed. His index and third finger ghosted over her thumb and the back of her hand. His eyes did not leave hers, and as she felt her cheeks flush she bit the inside of her lip.

She had not noticed when he took his gloves off; his skin was cool.

(The only thing Shosanna would remember of this exchange – later, when a certain Private Fredrick Zoller asked her about Pabst and when he told her his name – was the feel of Hellstrom’s hand against hers and that tight tangle of guilt as it was engulfed by something else).

 

 

 

He drags her to the bedroom. Her legs are weak and they stumble over each other, a rough desperation to his mouth she is unfamiliar with.

She falls to his bed first.

He does not let her catch her breath before he drives into her, hard.

Shosanna has been here before.

 

 

 

The first time he fucked her (she fucked him), Shosanna had drank three glasses of wine.

“Come with me,” he said, after, outside, the evening crisp despite the beckoning of the summer months. 

“Where am I going?” she asked, and when she smiled her teeth were stained from the wine.

“Come with me,” he repeated. He did not take her arm, he did not offer it, but she followed him. As she walked beside him, she thought this was one of the dumber things she had done, letting him sit across from her evening after evening, sharing herself in even that small amount, and now this deviation from the norm.

His apartment was close to both the café and her cinema. She did not dwell on this.

(In his apartment, Hellstrom did not make the first move. Shosanna did. He shut the door behind them and she lunged, her open mouth meeting his closed mouth as though on little more than a dare, little more than a small personal rebellion. She did not touch him anywhere but his mouth, and Hellstrom did not kiss her back.

Shosanna pulled away from him.

“What?” she said. “I thought this was what you wanted.”

Hellstrom kissed her this time, hot-blooded and full of anger, fingers pulling her hair, pulling her head back, fingers pulling her hips to his, and maybe this is what Shosanna wanted in the first place).

(They fucked in his kitchen that first time. They didn’t make it farther than the small kitchen table next to an open window. He lifted her onto it, dragged her shirt over her head; the night air, his hands, wet mouth all conspired to make her shudder).

(She laid in his bed next to him after, naked, with a cigarette. Hellstrom ran a finger along the crook and bend of her elbow. She held her breath.

“I know who you really are,” he said. Shosanna closed her eyes.

When she looked at him, the narrowed eyes, the teasing smile, she knew he was not lying).

 

 

 

He crowded her at the door of his apartment as she went to leave.

“If you are trying to intimidate me, it isn’t working,” she said.

“If I was trying,” he said, “you would know.”

 

 

 

Shosanna sits up, her body turned towards the door. Hellstrom grabs her hard by the wrist from his prone position on the bed. He does not say anything, and the sad thing is that he does not need to. The hand on her wrist, the unforgiving grip, his lazy posture on his stomach besides her is more than telling.

“I need to go,” she says quietly. She looks down at him and his eyes glint up at her in the semi-darkness. Shosanna turns away fast, hating the softness of her own voice, the closed circle his fingers create around her skin.

Hellstrom shifts onto his back and his hold does not lessen. His arm is across his chest as a result, muscles of his shoulder bunched and Shosanna looks at him again as he moves, finds him frighteningly male, her wrist impossibly delicate under his hand.

“There’s a curfew,” he grumbles; the words come slow but his tone is light. Shosanna almost smiles. Hellstrom catches this but he will not tell her. There are other methods to hold a flaw, a weakness, over someone’s head than simple gloating.

“You could escort me,” Shosanna says. She raises her chin and a large strand of her hair falls over her forehead and into her eyes. She leaves it.

Hellstrom throws his free arm behind his head and smirks. “I could.”

They lapse into silence, Hellstrom effortlessly anchoring her to the bed. Her legs never touched the floor, they remain on the bed, her right foot still covered by the discarded sheet. She has made no honest attempt to leave. Her mouth feels dry; his bedroom is cold against her bare back.

“Marcel will be – ” she says, then stops. The slight tilt to Hellstrom’s lips disappears and his face falls, the same unreadable expression the day she met him.

His grip tightens on her wrist first. This happens first. Next he pulls her, pulls her hard and pain wrenches into her shoulder and she gasps but she does not scream. He pins her down. Her breasts are pressed flat against the bed, he has a leg wedged between her own, the expanse of his naked chest flush with her equally naked back.

Her face is pressed down into the pillow, and when she takes a shaky breath in, all she can smell and taste is him. She feels herself start to tremble and hates herself for it. She can hear his mouth wet behind her ear – he is breathing heavily, she can feel him, half-hard, against her ass. 

“Want to go home to your Negro?” he hisses along her neck, her hair catching against his lips, and when she turns her head his mouth smears low on her cheek. “Let him smell me on you?” he asks, his tone more lascivious than angry now, more calculated and therefore more dangerous, and his nose bumps her cheekbone, her mouth opens slightly, his hips push fruitlessly against her ass. 

Shosanna’s fingers dig into the side of the mattress; his hand comes to wrap itself around hers, his fingers joining hers, and she closes her eyes, just for a moment, she closes her eyes. His other hand is rough at the nape of her neck, fingers pressing down along the center of her throat.

“Can you smell him on me?” she asks, and the question ends on a gasp as she feels his teeth.

Hellstrom’s mouth is open and he bites at the back of her shoulder. 

“I’ve erased him,” he whispers slowly into her skin, and his tongue does not try to soothe the bite.

The hand around her throat tightens, and she is moving her own hips back against him (she wants him inside her again she wants him inside) and her fingers no longer grip the mattress or the sheet but instead twist and entwine with his. 

(Hellstorm groans – long, slow, guttural – when he finally does enter her, and it is a sound she has never heard from him before. It makes something within her twist, something like power, he sounds so desperate, so needy, his body hot and huge over hers.

He fucks her from behind until suddenly he stops, he pulls out and he rolls her over to her back. He looks her in the eye this time when he pushes in. He does not groan this time, his eyes are too big, he does not need to).

 

 

 

Marcel chooses not to know about Hellstrom. They all have taken to telling lies to themselves in order to make everything a little easier.

Shosanna is not sleeping with another man.

Hellstrom is only following orders.

This is all for something greater – she does not let a Gestapo officer touch her like that because she likes it, because she likes the way he can make it hurt.

 

 

 

(She comes saying his name – Dieter, Dieter,  _Dieter_ , she says, hands scrambling in his hair, across his back,  _Dieter_.

It is the most awful thing she has ever done).

(He says her name too. He says her name just once, his fingers biting into the skin around her hip, the other hand cradling her head. He says her name just after he comes, his hips shifting against her, rhythm lost, as though searching to push that much deeper.

He says her name like he knows everything about her. He says her name into her mouth and does not kiss her after.

Hellstrom says, “ _Shosanna_ ,” and Shosanna trembles beneath him).

 

 

 

She can count on one hand the number of times he says her name to her face ( _three_ : once at his door and once in his bed, and once, one more time, the final time, now).

It is after. He will walk her to the cinema. He will not share his cigarette.

 

 

 

Once upon a time (in Nazi-occupied France):

“I want you to tend to the girl,” Colonel Landa told him. It was a long time ago, it was month, it was two weeks, it was yesterday. Time shades funny when you are not looking; your days spill over into the next.

“The girl is Shosanna Dreyfus. She took flight four years ago when her family was…dealt with.”

“You want me to kill her?”

“No. Not yet.” Landa smiled. “I want you to make sure she does not run again. Simple enough, yes?”

 

 

 

This is what will come to pass:

The next night Shosanna will be high on the ladder and she will drop letters to the ground. A young man will introduce himself; that young man will be Fredrick Zoller.

Two days from now a black car will approach and Shosanna will be back atop that same ladder. The black car will stop. First one man will step out, and then another.

“Actually I didn’t introduce myself,” he will tell her, his audience, in his native tongue, a restaurant, a bottle of champagne, and as she had watched that man unfold from the black car she had been positive the end had arrived – black car, black coat, black gun, the hand at her throat giving way to a trigger and bullet,  _Shosanna_. 

“Major Dieter Hellstrom of the Gestapo,” he will say. “At your service, Mademoiselle.”

She will sit and so will he, his body warm beside her.

But for now, now there are the quiet streets of Paris, there is the quiet, easy nonchalance to his gait, the nervous fumble to her hands she hides deep in her pockets as she walks alongside him. He does not touch her and she cannot decide if she wants him to, or if it will ever be possible that she has had enough of him. As the darkened awning of the cinema (her cinema) grows larger and closer she resigns herself to an answer of  _no_  and holds herself a little straighter.

There is the lack of knowledge of what will come next.

There is an alley that abuts the cinema. Hellstrom backs her into it. It takes little effort on his part: a hand at her elbow and he steers her to the left, steers her until she reaches a wall and that’s when he turns her, strands of her hair catching along the brick.

He kisses her, but before he kisses her he places a hand under her chin and raises her face to his. Unbeknownst to either, this will become a moment of finality both will reflect on at random in the final days that remain. Shosanna sucks in a harsh breath before he kisses her.

(He kisses her like he means it, as much as a man of his standing can ever mean it.

When he pulls back, he smiles, small.

“ _Au revoir_ , Shosanna,” he says).

 

 

 

They met in early spring. There had been rain that day and the entire city stank of mud and burnt paper and dampened wool uniforms.

“You’re the one who calls herself Emmanuelle Mimieux,” he said. It was not a question.

“I am Emmanuelle Mimieux,” was her answer.

“We’ll see about that,” he said.

He bought a ticket and he entered the theater.

 

 

 

 _fin._


End file.
